If you ask me, two types of games hold the player in contempt. One is fun and is my Mr. Grey, the other is imitating that prior game poorly. Sexual endeavors with the monsters in Dark Souls and Bloodborne aside. I’ve been racking my brains for over a month, possibly two, just to say Fade To Silence is a game that’s hard to find any gleaming moments of joy. The joy from Dark Souls and Bloodborne (two games I now have a pavlovian response to) comes from being a tiny little spec on the world and defeating a great big monster with bums for a face. Fade To Silence doesn’t have any of this.

In Fade to Silence, defeating an enemy might be the same level of difficulty as Dark Souls, yet it is lacking the reward from said toughness. That’s the issue with a heavy MMORPG or general RPG style combat. The risk-reward balance has to be equal or it just becomes a mess to play. If you fight a standard enemy and always get weapons you can kill them with in one hit and bosses in two or three hits, the game is too easy. Killing standard enemies to get very little or nothing results in a contemptuous battle between the player’s sense of risk-reward.

Sure, I could sit here for an hour sloshing on like a drunken sailor about the combat being a little too boring to call it the main gameplay loop; but you’d be hard pressed to find anything else to call the loop. The survival aspect is about as deep as a cut in a cheesecake, and the story is almost non-existent. To pull back the curtain here at Phenixx Gaming, we have a house editorial rule that you must list one good thing and one bad thing. I’ve found it very hard to get any good thoughts out about Fade To Silence.

I guess I enjoy the demon that infests you at the beginning, as it looks like Tzim-Sha‘s ball of cable from Doctor Who, and a dementor from Harry Potter with many tendrils coming from everywhere. However, you don’t face off with the tendril ghost monk at all, and the enemies you do fight are about as detailed as the toenails on monsters Zdzisław Beksiński would paint. Now that you’ve looked up that name, the world is as flat as a Francisco Goya background.

I guess what I’m saying is there is no design; nothing is guiding me in a direction to advance the game. It is survival and exploration for the sake of it; with the reason being you have a daughter, who is weak and helpless in these times of dread. So why is it that she’ll follow me around for a little bit for no reason? Why does she stay in the corrugated shack outside the temple you reset to? How does she even survive?

Most of the time I am the one scoffing down the health and food. I’ve been the one outside being attacked by slightly deformed glowing red zombies, sometimes with big claws. I am the one that needs to heal up and eat. Once again it is “This needs to be here for the sake of it being here,” only this time it is the hairy dad game motif that’s infested games since The Last of Us. The story falls apart at this point as the reason you are doing all of this survival nonsense doesn’t require food or shelter.

There is no punishment or incentive to give your child in the corrugated hovel any of your firewood or food because she does nothing. it is a game for those that believe Minecraft is too focused. From the first hour of playing until writing this review, all I have thought of it is: If survival and crafting mechanics were popular in the PlayStation 2 era of gaming, this would be the broad strokes it was painted with. Hence why there is co-op play.

I’ve never liked the term “It’s fun with friends,” everything can be fun with friends. Sitting in a room with nothing but your friends you can have fun because you are talking and engaging with those people. Playing an all together buggy game with friends is the whole reason some YouTubers gained popularity, and that’s where Fade To Silence fits in. It is a slightly bugged game with lots of downtime to sit around talking with people; aka your followers on Twitch or YouTube.

In conclusion, I don’t entirely recommend Fade to Silence as it is attempting to imitate the exploration and survival of Minecraft; while trying to garner a vague story aspect from something like Subnautica or This War of Mine. While featuring some worthwhile ideas, the broad brush strokes make it hard to enjoy them. With stamina based combat akin to Dark Souls you’d think I’d have loved it, but with a lifeless feel to every hit I asked myself why I even bother with enemies.

An Xbox One review Copy of Fade To Silence was provided by THQ Nordic for this review.

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Fade To Silence

$49.99

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• Good Atmosphere

Cons

• Clunk Controls
• Very Low Risk-reward Ratio
• A Nonsensical Plot

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